After the announcements of the past two years, cloud specialists who rely on so-called trusted offers will prepare the concrete implementation of their services. As such, the year 2023 could therefore be pivotal for this market segment. Thus, S3NS, the joint venture of the American giant Google and the French defense electronics specialist Thales launched in June 2022, has just unsheathed with a first offer, “Local Controls with S3NS”, available since the beginning of February.
Qualification expected in 2024
This public cloud offer looks like an aperitif, as the company hopes to obtain state qualification for its cloud computing services in the second half of 2024. The first offer launched offers data localization in France or Europe , cryptographic control of data access and more transparency. It must allow, explains the company, the beginning of the transitions of organizations to the cloud.
Leaving the first in May 2021, Bleu, the joint offer of the French Orange and Capgemini allied to the American publisher Microsoft, which will provide its Azure cloud services, was to support the first customers by the end of the year. year 2022, following a calendar presented in June 2022.
But no further announcements have been made since. Capgemini and Orange had explained that they were aiming for a launch of a platform in 2024, once the SecNumCloud qualification had been obtained.
Numspot’s heavyweight cast
While Atos has also approached Amazon Web Services – without however explicitly mentioning the construction of trusted offers for the moment – a third major player has entered the trusted cloud market this fall.
Docaposte, Dassault Systèmes, Bouygues Telecom and the Banque des Territoires have joined forces in the Numspot consortium to offer an operational offer from this year, a creation supported by the public authorities.
The new offering should benefit from a heavyweight cast of safety and health, an interesting combo from the perspective of the current Health Data Hub market. The former director of information systems for the National Health Insurance Fund Alain Issarni has indeed been recruited to take the helm of the company, while Guillaume Poupard, the former boss of Anssi, and Dominique Pon , the former ministerial head of digital health, were hired by Docaposte.
Doubts about hybrid offers
Another argument put forward by Numspot, the French character of its offer. The alliances of Orange, Capgemini and Thales with American tech giants have indeed caused a stir. MP Philippe Latombe, for example, displayed his skepticism about the ability of these hybrid offers to embrace the “best of both worlds”.
In support, a study by a law firm identified by The gallery pointed out last August the legal risks associated with this kind of offer, not necessarily beyond the reach of extraterritorial laws.
However, the “trusted cloud” label, issued by Anssi through the SecnumCloud repository, is precisely a mixture of provisions relating to computer security and legal guarantees, in particular vis-à-vis foreign laws deemed too intrusive, such as the famous American Cloud Act or the Chinese legislation on intelligence.
Scale issue
Several companies have already obtained this qualification. These are Cloud Temple, Oodrive, Outscale, OVH and Worldline. That is as many “already interesting offers, but with a limited scope”, nuance however Henri d’Agrain, the general delegate of CIGREF, an association which brings together large companies and public administrations. “On the subject of the cloud of trust, there is an issue of scale, to find solutions capable of meeting the needs of organizations with hundreds of thousands of users around the world”, he adds.
Overall, CIGREF estimates that approximately 20% of the data and associated processing of a large organization requires hosting in a trusted cloud, such as commercial and financial strategy data, or even intellectual property, such as research and development. .
Only a fraction of the information to be better protected which could be “problematic from an economic point of view” for Alain Bouillé, the president of the Club of experts in information and digital security (CESIN). Without expanding the target, these trusted data hosting and processing solutions “could have trouble breaking through,” he warns. 10 years after the fanfare launch of Numergy and Cloudwatt, the collapse of these two so-called sovereign cloud offers is still on everyone’s mind.